Geekularity

There may be a day in the not-too-distant future where a you need only hum a few bars before your bio-media-comm implant automatically checks all the online music stores, buys, downloads, and plays the song directly into your cerebral-cortextual-whoozawhatzit. Until then, there will be at least a few moving parts between you and your music enjoyment. Apple has made tremendous strides to reduce the number of moving parts by creating the closed system of iTunes and iPod. Outside of that system however, the amount of work required to get music into your ears increases exponentially.

Efforts to integrate other music services into the iPod music experience have come and gone, all with mediocre success. The process of transferring music from the outside into iTunes has either been too difficult to attract users or has been blocked, either legally or technologically, by Apple.

Amazon introduced their MP3 music download service this week, and so far it appears to have legs! The downloader used by this service is available on PC and Mac platforms, it integrates with iTunes and Windows Media Player, and best of all, the music is high fidelity and DRM free! The installation was a snap, and the music sounds great! Coupled with Amazon’s One-Click shopping experience, this service is poised to take a bite out of Apple’s music sales!

The Amazon MP3 service is still in beta, so there may be some additional features and UI enhancements in the coming months, but as of right now, it looks pretty good. Apple has a challenge that it will need to answer to. Possible responses from Apple may include:

• Ramping up their DRM-free music offerings assuming they can make nice with enough music labels. Perhaps they’ll even drop some prices on songs. Yay!! Competition breeds choice.
• Some technology kung fu or legal action which limits Amazon’s ability to load the songs directly into iTunes. Boo!! Apple talks the talk when it comes to openess, but can’t walk the walk as their feet are in cement shoes being poured by the ??? (RIAA?).

Fortunately, Amazon can play in the tall grass with the other big dogs, so I think we finally have another formidable player in the online music market! Game On!

First and foremost, I suggest making a backup of your iTunes library before you upgrade to the newest version. You already have a backup routine that has done a complete system backup in the last week anyway… right!

That being said, you may experience some difficulties syncing your iPod with music that you ripped from a CD after you have upgraded to iTunes 7.2. Especially if one or more songs match music that you had also bought from the iTunes Store. The error message I received was as follows:

“While syncing to <iPod device name>, the file <song name> was not copied because the file type is not supported by the iPod”

After several hours of fiddling with the MP3 file’s ID3 Tags and trying to rebuild the iTunes Library, I finally found the following fixit solution.

1. For each song that shows up in the error dialog box, find it in your iTunes library and copy it to a new location (I used my desktop).
2. Once the file has been copied to a new location, delete the file which is in your iTunes library by clicking on it from within iTunes and pressing the delete key. If you are prompted to keep the file or move it to the trash, choose to move it to the trash.
3. Re-import that song back into you iTunes library by clicking and dragging the copy of the file back into the iTunes window.
4. Sync your iPod again to confirm that 1) the file does not show up in the error list and 2) you can see and play the song on your iPod
5. You may need to iterate through this process several times as the sync error log seems to only show 100 songs at a time. If you have more than 100 songs that won’t sync, you may not know it until your next sync.

I hope this little incompatibility or file corruption just applies to me. However, I suspect that the iTunes 7.2 upgrade might cause problems for more people in the coming days. Please leave your thoughts, complaints and suggestions in the comment section of this post. I’d like to know if this is a small problem or if it’s more wide-spread.

[UPDATE 2007-05-31 1:32 PM]

There’s a new discussion and several other solutions available in the Apple support forums:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4645674

[UPDATE 2007-06-01 9:42 AM]

Playlist Magazine has an article, in which they call this problem a bug. However, I’m still inclined to think that this was intentional behavior from Apple to test the waters on how many people had indeed burned their iTunes Store music out to CD and then reimported it.

http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/itunes72gotcharedux/index.php

This is the signage that faces out to a busy street in my neighborhood. I couldn’t help but giggle when I was stopped at the light and finally read the sign!

So, if you are absolutely jonzing for milk tea and karaoke, bring your laptop along and get some work done between your encore sets.

You’ve been a part of my daily routine for a year, and now I will find something new. It’s been difficult to think for myself again -blink-

Thank you to Ze Frank and The Show for such a wonderful addition to the Geek Zeitgeist!

P.S. We think Ze’s facemelting didgeridoo solo (pictured at right) produced the brown note for our son!

Apparently Rodrigo Sanchez, of the super awesome guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela, is having some problems with his travel visa. As a result, Rodrigo y Gabriela has canceled their show at SXSW tomorrow night. It’s not like I was going to be there to see them, but a bummer none-the-less. All I hope is that they get the visa problems squared away by April, so they can make their appearance in San Francisco! Because I will definitely be there!

Jonathan Coulton, of “Code Monkey” and “Alpha Beta Prime” fame, makes a wonderful guest appearance as “Troubadour” on the audio book The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (AKA the PC Guy). The audio book was offered as a freebie on iTunes today, and I couldn’t pass it up. The addition of Jonathan Coulton was a delightful surprise!

As you may know, “Code Monkey” held the #1 spot on my “top 10 obscure but geeky songs” chart for a record breaking 45 weeks. The song was supplanted only recently by “Stroller Town,” also by Jonathan Coulton. While not a true geek referencing song, “Stroller Town” was a timely addition to the playlist just as I received a second stamp in my Passport of Fatherhood.